By timothy from Slashdot's all-a-blur-at-this-point department:An anonymous reader writes "A new report details the analysis of more than 450 million lines of software through the Coverity Scan service, which began as the largest public-private sector research project focused on open source software integrity, and was initiated between Coverity and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security in 2006. Code quality for open source software continues to mirror that of proprietary software — and both continue to surpass the industry standard for software quality. Defect density (defects per 1,000 lines of software code) is a commonly used measurement for software quality. The analysis found an average defect density of .69 for open source software projects, and an average defect density of .68 for proprietary code."

By timothy from Slashdot's party-line-but-with-less-yelling department:judgecorp writes "BT Retail has started testing Carrier Grade NAT (CGNAT) with its customer. CGNAT is a controversial practice, in which IP addresses are shared between customers, limiting what customers can do on the open Internet. Although CGNAT goes against the Internet's original end-to-end principles, ISPs say they are forced to use it because IPv4 addresses are running out, and IPv6 is not widely implemented. BT's subsidiary PlusNet has already carried out CGNAT trials, and now BT is trying it on "Option 1" customers who pay for low Internet usage."

By timothy from Slashdot's is-that-nostalgia? department:Deathspawner writes "There's little that's more frustrating than being a legal customer and getting screwed over by the company you're supporting. If there's a perfect example of this, it's with Microsoft's OS and its millions of customers that have had to ring its tech support lines for activation help. Recently, a Techgage writer got bit by an issue with Windows 8 — caused by Microsoft itself — and wasn't even able to call to fix it. Microsoft has two problems to solve here: it needs online chat support (like most large companies in 2013) and it definitely needs an activation system that doesn't make things difficult for its legal customers on a too-regular basis."

By Unknown Lamer from Slashdot's amazon-is-the-new-walmart department:schwit1 quotes The Washington Post: "The Senate aimed to help traditional retailers and financially strapped state and local governments Monday by passing a bill that would widely subject online shopping — for many a largely tax-free frontier — to state sales taxes. The Senate passed the bill by a vote of 69 to 27, getting support from Republicans and Democrats alike."

schwit1 adds "Unfortunately online businesses could be in for a rude awakening when it comes to the law's interpretation." Passage in the House is not certain, and companies like eBay are lobbying to raise the minimum sales required to collect state sales tax to $10 million instead of $1 million per year.

By Unknown Lamer from Slashdot's don't-mess-with-the-court department:SternisheFan tipped us to news that the infamous copyright trolls Prenda Law are in a bit of trouble with the law. Today, U.S. District Court judge Otis Wright issued sanctions against Prenda. He recommends that the lawyers involved be disbarred and fined, granted court and lawyer fees to the defendants (doubled for punishment), and has referred them for criminal prosecution. Among the findings of fact are that they set up dozens of shell companies to disguise the true owners, actually committed identity theft, dodged taxes on settlement money, lied to the court, and abused the court by setting settlements on flimsy charges just below the cost of a defense.

By Unknown Lamer from Slashdot's never-trust-malware department:wiredmikey writes "A group of researchers from Northwestern University and North Carolina State University tested ten of the most popular AV products on Android, and discovered that they were easily fooled by common obfuscation techniques.In a paper (PDF), the researchers said they tested AV software from several well-know security vendors. In order to evaluate the mobile security software, the researchers developed a tool called DroidChameleon, which applies transformation techniques to Android applications. Known malware samples were transformed to generate new variants that contain the exact malicious functions as before. These new variants were then passed to the AV products, and much to the surprise of the paper's authors, they were rarely flagged — if at all. According to the research, 43% of the signatures used by the AV products are based on file names, checksums or information obtained by the PackageManager API. This means that, as mentioned, common transformations will render their protection useless for the most part. For example, the researchers transformed the Android rootkit Droid Dream for their test. DroidDream is a widely-known and highly dangerous application. Yet, when it was transformed, every AV program failed to catch at least two variants."

Original paper. Unlike current quantum networks that only allow point-to-point networking, the system at Los Alamos combines traditional and quantum links to route messages through a hub while retaining the security advantages of quantum networking.

By Unknown Lamer from Slashdot's zero-point-one-internet-archives department:An anonymous reader writes with an update on the rapid adoption of BitTorrent Lab's Sync tool. From the article: "BitTorrent on Monday announced an impressive milestone for its file synchronization tool Sync: users have synced over 1PB of data. The company says over 70 terabytes are synced via the tool every day. BitTorrent first announced its Sync software back in January and released a private alpha. Between then and April 23, when the company release a public alpha, users synced over 200TB worth of data. In other words, over the past 13 days users have synced over 800TB of data. At this rate, the service will pass 10PB before even hitting a stable release."

By samzenpus from Slashdot's words-for-word department:An anonymous reader writes "While Apple views the tablet and PC markets as two separate entities, Microsoft takes the opposing view. During a CNBC interview this morning, Gates continued to toe the party line insofar as he praised the benefits of Microsoft's tablets and Windows 8 while explaining that iPad users are frustrated because they have trouble typing and creating documents. 'With Windows 8, Microsoft is trying to gain share in what has been dominated by the iPad-type device. But a lot of those users are frustrated, they can't type, they can't create documents. They don't have Office there. So we're providing them something with the benefits they've seen that have made that a big category, but without giving up what they expect in a PC.'"

By samzenpus from Slashdot's looking-at-your-code department:vinces99 writes "Imagine taking a swab of saliva from your mouth and, within minutes, having your DNA ready for genome sequencing. A new device from University of Washington engineers and a company called NanoFacture can extract human DNA from fluid samples in a simpler, more efficient and environmentally friendly way than conventional methods. It will give hospitals and labs a much easier way to separate DNA from human fluid samples, which will help with genome sequencing, disease diagnosis and forensic investigations."

By Roblimo from Slashdot's what-happens-if-we-mix-some-of-this-and-some-of-that? department:HiveBio in Seattle is not the world's first community-based biology lab, but it may be the first one started by a high school student. Her name is Katriona Guthrie-Honea, and her co-founder is Bergen McMurray. They managed to get a lot of equipment and supplies donated to their new venture, along with a successful Microryza Campaign that raised $6425 even though their target was only $5100. They're renting space from a local hackerlab, and getting an insaneamount of publicity for a venture that's just starting out. But why not? If Bergen's and Katriona's example can spur others to learn and create, whether in mechanical engineering, physics, electronics, computer science or biology, it's all good -- not only for the participants, but for anyone who might someday benefit from creations or discoveries made by people who got their first taste of hands-on science or engineering in a hackerspace or community biology lab.

By samzenpus from Slashdot's pay-up department:First time accepted submitter JDG1980 writes "According to CNET and various other sources, CS6 will be the last version of Adobe's Creative Suite that will be sold in the traditional manner. All future versions will be available by subscription only, through Adobe's so-called 'Creative Cloud' service. This means that before too long, anyone who wants an up-to-date version of Photoshop won't be able to buy it – they will have to pay $50 per month (minimum subscription term: one year). Can Adobe complete the switch to subscription-only, or will the backlash be too great? Will this finally spur the creation of a real competitor to Photoshop?"

By samzenpus from Slashdot's better-late-than-never department:An anonymous reader writes "Terrafugia has unveiled plans to build a semi-autonomous, hybrid-electric, vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicle for personal aviation. The new design, called TF-X, is in the works even as the company's first product, Transition, is still awaiting production because of technical and regulatory hurdles. Terrafugia's founder says the goal of TF-X, if it can get past the safety issues in both aviation and automotive industries, is to 'open up personal aviation to all of humanity.' But it will have a lot of competition from companies including AgustaWestland, Pipistrel, and the stealthy Zee.Aero, all of which are working on vertical-takeoff-and-landing vehicles for consumers."